Being Fair

And that isn't as in the Fairest of them all, because I may wish it but it aint so. Fairest of all the 26 year old women who have curly hair, glasses and occasionally blog and call themselves Kitten maybe. That's as in pale, wan, translucent (my personal favourite), white, untannable. Now, I know I am not as pale as some, namely Beanie and Geef who once got burnt within approximately two minutes of stepping outside. However, I do have trouble not with getting burnt so much but with getting stuff to match my skin tone. I recently bought a tinted moisturiser for fair skin with an SPF to speed up my morning toilette a little. I got the 'fair' tint, tried it on my hand and it looked okay. When I put it on my face at home before work on Monday morning, I looked ever so slightly like I was blacking up and my face hovered above my extremely white-looking neck like a magnum on a white stick. So I did my neck and then rued the fact that I was wearing a low cut top as an expanse of white spread out from my now-brown neck. Unfortunately, by that point, I had to get my train and ran out of the house without any breakfast. Fortunately I had make-up remover things with me and was able to get rid of the ridiculous face and neck when I got to work. So not only did the tint look stupid, it also slowed me down rather than sped me up! I have since decided to improve my colour with self-tanning moisturisers instead and now I am covered in patchy golden brown bits of skin. I can't win. I should just accept that colour does not look good on my skin and I will not be able to get away with white at my wedding, otherwise no-one will be able to see my face and, if it is a particularly bright day, may get struck down with snow-blindness.

Bad Blogginess

I have not been in the mood to write this week. I don't know why, maybe it's because I haven't spent long enough brushing my teeth (although they are still clean teeth, don't get me wrong). I just felt that my last post wasn't as inspired as it could have been and am scratching my brain as to what I should write next. I have been feeling tired lately - maybe it's the stress of thinking about moving, which we should be doing soon, or MuleBoy's insomnia which is bad at the moment. Maybe my mental faculties just aren't acute enough to ramble in a crazy way as is my usual style, I don't know. I promise to be back on form soon, but don't expect too much for a while. I will post, just don't expect the high quality word diarrhoeia that I know you have come to expect from me for a while. Inferior diarrhoeia for the near future it is, then.

Mouthbreathing

I have a stigma to do with the fact that I breathe through my mouth rather than my nose. When I first started doing Pilates, a lot of emphasis was placed on breathing through the nose and I would either forget to do it or start inhaling desperately through suddenly blocked nostrils. When relaxed, as now, I can breathe quite easily through my nose but as soon as I start moving about, the panic sets in and my mouth opens. Embarrassingly, I found myself wheezing a few weeks back in Boxercise as the guy who runs it was yelling "breathe sensibly in through the nose and out through the mouth" to the group at large. I just can't get enough air in through my nose and then I start to panic when jumping about and boxing things. Having said that, the fact that I don't do it automatically is also a problem and in Pilates I would generally switch off and also forget to engage my pelvic floor and core stability muscles, which is like some kind of very-specific-to-Pilates crime.

However, I can understand and excuse these exercise things as the body under stress does funny things, what I do get worried about is what it looks like onstage and in real life (I can't believe that I put it in that order of priority). People who have their mouth open all the time look a bit dense, sad but true, and I really don't want my mouthbreathing make me look like an idiot, which is where the stigma comes in. Maybe I should tape my mouth up for a while so that I am forced to breathe through my nose. Cue line of people queueing up to help me out with that one. Suggestions welcome however. Teach me how to be like the cool kids with their nose-breathing skills.

Films, Lovely Films

The Mule and I went to the cinema on Saturday for a double billing of cinematic delights. Neither of us had been for ages due to other, theatrical commitments and MuleBoy's Uni workload. I was desperate to see Slither and quite fancied Confetti (it has Jessica Stevenson in, which is a reason to watch anything except dire BBC sitcoms) but Mule was in more of a Mission Impossible 3 mood and if you can't have one star of Spaced... Well, Slither helped my diet out as I had no intention of eating sweets or indeed anything for a while after it finished. While I like horror, and I do, there's something about body-horror that makes me a little bit squeamish. With flesh-eating people, phallic tentacles and evil (and again phallic) red squishy worms, it was a bit too much, especially towards the film's climax when there was a sequence of great unpleasantness. However, I would still thoroughly recommend it as I'm a big fan of B-movies and enjoyed the humour and scares. There was a nice sense of surprise going through the film; no-one really knew how to deal with the situation they were suddenly faced with and none of the characters were ever particularly safe. Although I do play the "who's going to die" game with certain genres (horror, disaster movies) it is nicer if it isn't spelled out. I also approve of anything that gives Cap'n Tightpants (Nathan Fillion) a starring role.

MI: 3 was surprisingly good, I was disappointed by the first and avoided the second but decided to watch this one. Mainly because JJ Abrams was in charge and it has Phillip Seymour Hoffman in it (and the other star of Spaced, Simon Pegg). JJ Abrams had made me happier because he was going back to the notion of the Mission Impossible team, that, lets face it, was the point of the TV series. I remember ridiculous plots that shouldn't have worked but were a lot of fun in their implausability and always boosted by the fact that you had loads of different experts. I was really enjoying the first 10 minutes of MI: 1 because you had Emilio Estevez being clever with computers etc, Kristin Scott Thomas being fabulous and Tom Cruise being the front man. It was then hugely disappointing when they all died and Tom ended up being the only man. So this was a return to the team and, on the whole, it worked. Still a little too much emphasis on Crazy Tom, but there we go. And Pegg was great. I've got this thing about British actors playing British characters in American products, I love it if they do well and really stay British. I think it's because I hate being badly represented so would prefer if they manage to retain their identity. I never really understood why Helen Baxendale couldn't just say "trousers" in Friends and had to say "pants". Would the writers have fired her if she'd put her foot down? I think not. Maybe they should have done for being patently unfunny, but that's a different matter. Anyway, Simon Pegg is funny, probably had some input on his lines, and you should all look out for Hot Fuzz which is in production at the mo.

I also bought Primer last Friday, which I am hoping to watch soon. Apparently it's a combination of lots of different films that I like (eg Donnie Darko, Memento) and you've got to love innovative independents.

Age

We generally get bulletins read out to us at work by Neanderthal Boy, who spends a lot of his day skimming through news websites. This is a person who thinks exclamation marks at the end of a sentence automatically mean that someone is being sarcastic (heaven forbid that they should be, say, exclaiming) and he still is more news-aware than me. Anywho, he has just informed us that the world's oldest person has just celebrated their 128th birthday. Now, for anyone who is feeling old presently, let's think about that in proportion to the nice lady in El Salvador who has 13 children and multiple grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. My main surprise is that she's in El Salvador; who knew that somewhere that volatile could produce such an aged person. I always picture the very oldest people as living on tiny little islands in the East somewhere, with very healthy diets of fish and rice.

In comparison, my Mum, who celebrated her **th birthday on Tuesday, is nothing but a babe-in-arms, although she's not very much like a **-year-old anyway. When she was a few years older than me now, she successfully convinced people she was a schoolgirl onstage and I distinctly remember one of my friend's grandmothers at a party telling me, aged 12 and spending the night upstairs, that she looked like a girl of 17 (which I think Mum, then in her early 40s, scoffed at afterwards). So she has always been very successful at being younger, which is due as much to her young spirit as to her enviably good skin and bright eyes. Lucky Mum.